“Wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad,” US President recently ranted in his State of the Union .
, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality,” is a trigger word for Donald Trump. His government wants all terms perceived as part of this culture of wokeness, such as “sexuality,” “transsexual,” “non-binary,” “climate crisis” and “racism” to disappear from US federal documents.
During his election campaign, Trump had already made it very clear: Under his watch, there will only be two , male and female. Anything beyond that is superfluous nonsense to him, and sexual diversity in schools, the workplace and the armed forces should no longer exist.
Trump said he wanted to end the “tyranny” of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, and one of his first executive orders terminated all such programs.
Following the government’s lead, major companies including Amazon, Google, McDonald’s, Meta, Target and Walmart are also rolling back their DEI programs.
Even universities now need to deal with the issue; the board of the University of Virginia is the latest school to have decided to shutter its DEI office.
‘Critical race theory is poison’
Donald Trump has also ordered US public schools to stop teaching “critical race theory” (CRT) and other topics dealing with race and sexuality, or else they risk losing their federal funding.
CRT states that US social institutions such as the criminal justice system, education and healthcare systems or the labor or housing markets have built-in , which leads to a systemic disadvantage for people of color.
Many US states have already banned CRT, on the grounds that it places all white people under the general suspicion of being racist oppressors.
Psychologist: ‘Criticism of radical wokeness is understandable’
Wokeness has become weaponized in the US, but beyond brash right-wing “anti-woke” attacks, criticism against it is also understandable from a rational, scientific point of view, psychologist and author Esther Bockwyt tells DW. In her book “Woke: Psychology of a Culture War,” she takes a critical look at wokeness, including its negative aspects.
She says that political pushback against wokeness cannot only be explained by the fear of change; unhealthy excesses have also occurred under the guise of wokeness.
As an example, she cites the discussion as to whether people who were assigned male at birth but feel female should be allowed to participate in women’s sports, or in which prisons trans inmates should serve time. In Bockwyt’s view, biological facts collide with an ideology that puts personal identity above everything else.
Bockwyt feels that rejection of extreme wokeness by middle class society is justified: “Everyone can agree with the idea of being aware of discrimination, but it has really become more radical,” she says. “It tends to divide people rather than bring them together.”
A potpourri of issues seen as ‘woke’
In Germany like in the US, the wide range of issues perceived as woke include transgender rights, veganism, climate protection, feminism and cancel culture. Anything deemed “woke” provokes anger that is then directed primarily against people who have a leftist or green political stance.
Gender-sensitive language, or what is known as “” in German, has been described by its critics as a “rape of the German the language.”
And then there have been cases that have sparked public outrage, especially when they target beloved German classics, such as the “” books and films, which tell the story of a fictional Native American hero.
That often leads the general population to lose sight of the initial intention behind woke culture: to avoid harming underprivileged minorities through language. Instead, they see “woke” people as a “moralizing minority” who supposedly wants to educate and patronize those who think differently.
Is gender a threat to democracy?
In June 2023, the future Chancellor Friedrich Merz from the conservative Christian Democratic CDU party commented on “gendering” on X, claiming that speaking in a gender-sensitive manner would increase the popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party: “With every gendered news broadcast, a few hundred more votes go to the AfD. Gendered language and identity ideology are no longer just silently rejected by a large majority of the population. They are perceived as intrusive,” he wrote.
In recent years, books that not only analyze wokeness critically, but also describe it as a “danger to democracy” have become bestsellers in Germany.
For example, in “The New Culture War. How a Woke Left Threatens Science, Culture and Society” (2023), ethnologist Susanne Schröter describes wokeness as “ideological terror” and a “creeping construction of a new surveillance state.”
The ‘woke left’ as a scapegoat
Such books work against the “woke left,” and their authors are finding acceptance in large parts of society, especially when the most extreme cases are turned into media controversies.
Other demagogues are not satisfied with criticizing the existing excesses of woke culture, they even evoke nightmarish versions of the “woke dictatorship,” as is the case of the YouTube videos by Austrian neuroscientist and psychiatrist Raphael M. Bonelli.
Trump’s bans will not eliminate something that is now part of society: an increased awareness that we should deal with minorities more sensitively. The culture war on wokeness is bound to remain part of discussions in Western societies for a long time to come.
In this context, Esther Bockwyt calls for a rational approach that “avoids generalizations, in the style: everything that is anti-woke is right-wing and whatever is woke is good. We should try to find a differentiated perspective.”
This article was originally written in German.
The post The culture war on ‘wokeness,’ from the US to Germany appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
